Late Happy Days star Erin Moran lost her battle with cancer while watching TV in bed.
The actress’ widower, Steven Fleischmann, took to Facebook on Tuesday (25Apr17) to share details about Erin’s throat cancer struggle, revealing she was diagnosed in December (16), days after waking up and finding a drop of blood on her pillow.
“She said I think I bit my tongue,” Steven recalled in an open letter posted online. “We get like 4 days into December, there’s more blood. I get a flashlight and say let me look.
“It was not her tongue but her tonsil on the left side. I thought it was tonsillitis. So we went to an ENT (Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist) who said they wanted to biopsy it. It came back squamous cell carcinoma.”
Erin immediately began radiation and chemotherapy treatment, but by February (17), the cancer had become too advanced for her to “speak or eat or drink”.
“It got so bad so fast,” he shared, explaining the actress was kept alive via a feeding tube, but remained “happy”.
Things started to take a turn for the worse last Friday (21Apr17), on the eve of her death, when she struggled to breathe, and by Saturday morning (22Apr17), Erin, 56, had started to succumb to the disease while at their Indiana home.
“She was there watching T.V in bed,” he wrote. “I laid down next to her held her right hand in my left. I feel asleep woke up about a hour later still holding her hand and she was gone, she was just gone (sic).”
Steve, who wed Erin in 1993, goes on to claim medics never told them just how badly the cancer had become, and after her passing on Saturday, he learned from the coroner it had spread to her spleen and her brain.
The news emerges hours after Erin’s Happy Days co-star Scott Baio apologized for comments he made about the actress’ prior drug and alcohol abuse during a live radio interview on Monday (24Apr17), suggesting her addiction issues led to her death. He subsequently insisted he had no idea she had been battling cancer, and had been misled by a false report alleging she had died from a heroin overdose.
